Стефани Баррон - The White Garden - A Novel of Virginia Woolf

“You mentioned you were done with my notebook,” she ventured.

“I did.” He walked swiftly, with his blond head slightly bowed; a slim figure, unconsciously graceful. He might almost have been striding along alone — except that she was aware of him almost imperceptibly shepherding her through the crowd. “Miss Bellamy, would you describe yourself as a person of integrity?”

“Does my tea depend on it?”

He grimaced. “I’m feeling rather as though I’ve gone out on a limb. I don’t suppose you understand me.”

“You want to know if I’m honest.” She tried to think objectively. “I have a great deal of integrity about my work — getting it right, for myself and the people who hire me. I would like to think I treat the people I love with honesty. But…” She hesitated, aware of conflict in her soul, Gray hovering over her. “I’m not perfect. I make mistakes. All the time.”

“Which is in itself the most honest thing you could say. Thank you.”

They dashed through traffic in Piccadilly and then into the Burlington Arcade. He was leading her to a place called Ladurée, a bright shining birdcage of a room filled with pastel-colored French pastries, melt-in-the-mouth macaroons for which Paris was famous.

“Opened recently,” Llewellyn murmured. “We’re not too sure about it. Londoners, I mean. Suspicious of anything too French. I got over that, myself, years ago.”

They chose a plateful of exotic flavors from the rows of coat-button–size confections and sat down at a tiny table, their knees almost touching, to wait for a pot of tea. When it came, Jo closed her eyes and allowed the bergamot fragrance of Earl Grey to drift to her nostrils. “I should bring some of this home to my grandmother. She loves British tea.”

“Masterpiece Theatre fan?”

“Military nurse. She was stationed here for years during the war. Never got over it.”

“Ah!” His expression, which had been curiously concentrated when he looked at Jo, suddenly relaxed. “That’s all right, then. I suppose she gave you this?”

He had drawn the notebook out of his coat pocket and held it before her like a flag.

“Nana? How could she? I found it at Sissinghurst!”

“So you said.” Llewellyn lifted the teapot carefully and refilled his cup. “Only, you see, it doesn’t work. I wish it did, because you’ve said you’re honest and I like you, Miss Bellamy. I’d hoped we could deal frankly with one another.”

Jo felt her face suffuse with heat. Carefully, she set down her half-finished macaroon and wiped her fingers on her napkin. “I don’t lie, Mr. Llewellyn. What about the notebook doesn’t work?”

“It doesn’t square with the evidence, I’m afraid. The historic record of Woolf’s life.” He took a sip of tea. “Whoever wrote this went to a great deal of trouble — the notebook itself is authentically of the period, the ink is probably prewar, although we’d have to verify that chemically; the language is similar to the sort of stuff Woolf wrote to be just plausible — ”

“Then why — ”

“Indeed, certain phrases and passages might almost have been lifted straight from her work — and probably were,” he added hurriedly. “Then there’s the references to Lady Nicolson and her family, their shared past, Woolf’s novel Orlando , which is dedicated to Vita — and so on and so forth.”

“So what’s — ”

“It’s clearly a forgery, I’m afraid.”

“Why?”

“You honestly don’t know? You never noticed?”

Jo frowned.

“Open to the first page, Miss Bellamy, and read out the date.”

She did as she was told.

“Twenty-nine March 1941,” she read, “ Sissinghurst . What’s so wrong about that?”

Llewellyn leaned across the table. His gray eyes were studying her with something like pity. He had not touched his macaroons.

“Do you know when Virginia Woolf drowned herself in the River Ouse?”

Jo shook her head.

“The day before your notebook starts — March twenty-eight, 1941.”

SHE WOKE ME THIS MORNING WITH SUCH AN EXPRESSION of worry that at first I thought I had offended her, from staying abed so late into the morning. I had been drowning in sleep for hours — down, down, into the depths of this feather bed, its curtains pulled close, like a Tudor princess sacrificed to policy — never in recent memory have I slept so sound. The voices in my head banished sleep, a constant argument overheard on the Tube, a BBC broadcast perpetually in the background, an intimate whisper of invective and abuse. I could not write for their clamour in my ears —

“He has written to me,” she said. “There — you may see the letter. It’s quite dreadful, darling.”

I knew the hand. I did not have to take it to see who it was — why my Vita was agitated so dreadfully. L. is a terrible scold. With the best intentions in the world — the preservation of genius — he will drive one to the edge of insanity, and observe as one falls over. Waiting with his net. Waiting with his snare .

I am never so much L.’s own, as when I am mad .

It is the kind of mastery he craves; all our friends, cooing with sympathy: You have preserved for the world her genius what would she have done without you we should never have known Mrs. Dalloway and To The Lighthouse! And I, dutiful child, nod swiftly and say to them all: I have been so very happy with L. So good to me, always .

“I won’t read it,” I said, thrusting back the covers. I fancied I saw him folded up quietly in a corner of the room, thin knees tucked in, watching me. He was smiling; there was intent behind his eyes, some devilment. “I shall simply pack my things and go. You won’t betray me?”

“Darling, you don’t understand.” Vita sank down onto the bed, the letter slack in her fingers. “He has told everyone you’re dead. That you killed yourself. He intends to send the information to The Times . Apparently they’re dragging for your body, back at Rodmell…”

My body .

The chuckling brown water, inviting me. Seducing me. Dragging at my thighs. And but for the bird singing Vita! I might have plunged in .

“What did you write,” she said, “in that letter you left him?”

“Merely that I could not go on. That I felt I was going mad again. That he would be better without me — able to work. That no one had been kinder.”

Vita snorted. “He took it as Farewell — when you simply meant farewell. How you’ve made him wretched, darling. Should you like me to telephone from the village?”

“SO YOU SEE,” PETER LLEWELLYN WAS SAYING APOLOGETICALLY “it’s quite impossible. She was drowned the day before the journal begins.”

“All right,” Jo admitted, “I never focused on the dates. I didn’t buy a biography of Woolf in a bookstore and check when she killed herself. It never occurred to me. My interest in this is secondary — ”

“What is your interest, Miss Bellamy?”

It was a way of asking the question he’d been avoiding, Jo realized: Are you a crook, Miss Bellamy? Are you attempting a massive literary fraud and hoping to use me as your dupe?

It was kind of Llewellyn, she thought with a rush of gratitude, not to have said all that outright. His tact impressed her as fundamentally decent, as optimistic regarding the goodness of other people — knowing what he did about the dates, he could so easily have thrown the notebook in her face on the paving outside Sotheby’s. Instead, he had invited her to tea.